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Tracking your Google keyword rankings may seem like a tedious task at first, but there are many tools available to make this task much simpler for you. There are dozens of SEO tools that let you track your keyword rankings easily. These tools are sometimes free, based on a freemium model, or paid, and are used by SEO professionals and simple webmasters alike. As there are so many SEO tools out there, it may seem difficult to find out which one is the best for your needs. To make things easier for you, here is a presentation of some of the top SEO tools that let you check your keyword rankings:

SERP Checker

If you’re looking for a free and simple tool to check your rankings, SERP Checker is worth looking at. It lets you rapidly check and graph the top 300 search results for your specified keywords and domains. You also have the option of entering competitor domains to see how others in your niche are ranking for keywords that you’re targeting as part of your SEO efforts. SERP Checker is completely free to use and is web based, so there is no need to download and install any software. While the tool has a very simple layout, there is a detailed how-to section and FAQ page on the SERP Checker website to provide help and tips if you need them.

Google SERP Tool

Hosted on Codecanyon, this $3 app lets you see what position your website is in Google search results for your specified keywords. You simply input your URL, your keywords and the software does the rest in just a few seconds. As a very basic program, it doesn’t use Google’s API, rather it just makes HTTP requests to get the data.

While it may not be as powerful as some full featured SEO packages, the Google SERP Tool at Codecanyon is very cheap and practical, making it suitable for SEO beginners.

WebCEO

WebCEO is a professional suite that contains a ranking checker which lets you take a look at the keyword rankings for your website and also run a comparison to see how you rank compared to your competitors. This desktop software has many interesting features for webmasters and SEO professionals alike. One of the most convenient ones is the ability to make historical reports of how your site has ranked in Google’s SERPs. This will give you a quick look at whether your SEO efforts are starting to pay off.

Even though WebCEO is intended primarily for more advanced users, it is still remarkably easy to use, even for someone who has never used SEO software before. The setup is very simple: a wizard lets the user complete their profile, which includes their website and keywords. Then, the WebCEO ranking checker will access search engines and provide several detailed reports.

Unlike some other products that only give you the position of your site in SERPs and not much else, WebCEO’s reports are a lot more detailed. You can access historical reports that can show when a particular page was indexed by search engines, compare your rankings to competitors, view search result snippets. If you want to compare your site to competitors, WebCEO offers a ranking score that gives you a quick glance at how you are doing on search engines against competing websites.

Finally, in case you’re worried that the high amounts of queries you run on search engines will lead you to get banned, WebCEO has addressed this issue with their software. According to the developers, their ranking tool is designed to simulate normal human browsing activity, so you are quite unlikely to get IP banned from search engines for using this tool.

Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a free Firefox extension that is used by over 500,000 webmasters around the world. This extension lets you easily check how your site ranks on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Once you’ve installed this handy browser extension, you can set it up so that it pulls data from search engines periodically.

For those who are concerned about privacy, there is nothing to worry about with Rank Checker. Your data is only sent to the search engines and nobody else. Thus, there is no need to worry about whether a SEO company somewhere is aggregating your data, as is sometimes the case with web-based tools.

The rank checker’s interface and result presentation is very simple. You get a side by side comparison of how you rank for your specified keywords on each of the major search engines. If you want to keep track of the data that you’ve collected, you can then export the results in CSV format. A graphing extension is available for Rank Checker, so you will be able to create graphs with the results if you want to.

Rank Tracker

Advertised as a solution for serious webmasters and SEO professionals, Rank Tracker has one of the best layouts that you can find in a professional keyword tracking tool. The main page that shows up after you run queries shows how you rank on different search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo), plus it also shows how your ranking has changed.

If you’re trying to find more keywords that you could optimize your site around, Rank Tracker can also help you with that. It includes a keyword suggestion tool which allows you to discover additional keywords that could be profitable for you.

If you want to get a regular picture of how you’re doing in search engine rankings, Rank Tracker can help you with that too. You can set it to automatically run at a predefined time and produce its reports daily if you need to.

One feature that sets Rank Tracker apart from the rest is the number of search engines it supports.Other keyword ranking tools often only show how you do on Google, Bing and Yahoo. But Rank Tracker supports all localized versions of the main search engines, plus some additional ones like Yandex, Alexa, Ask.com, Lycos, Dogpile, Excite and more. New search engines are added on a regular basis and updates are released whenever a major change happens in an engine’s algorithm.

While Rank Tracker is more expensive than some other tools (it costs $125 for the professional version), you do have the chance to download the fully-functional free edition to test its functionality and find out whether the product is right for you. Rank Tracker has versions that run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, so no matter what platform you use, you will be able to use the software.

Choosing an SEO Tool

These are just some of the most common SEO tools available online that can let you check how your site ranks on search engines. There are many others available, some being web based, while others are desktop applications. To select the best one for your needs, simply look through available tools and check out their feature lists, as well as the screenshots of their user interfaces. You will be happy to see that many of the professional-grade SEO tools out there will often come with a free evaluation or basic version, so you can actually try the tool before you spend hundreds of dollars on it.

Eric Sornoso is an avid learner and online marketing consulting. He runs Infographic Seeding and Fish Free Media, and is an author for several major SEO publications, including SocialMediaExaminer.com.

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